Christianity and Mythology in the Greek Church

By the year 313, when the Edict of Milan marked a decisive
rapprochement between the Roman Empire and the Church, the Church
already had behind it two centuries of existence at the heart of a
Hellenism that had itself been drawn into the flow of history
during that time. To be sure that ancient religious system was
still in place, under the benevolent aegis of the reigning power
and elites and in the collective conservation of tradition. The
place and times of rites persisted, with their developments, their
mythic justifications punctuated by major or minor names from the
classical pantheon. This picture, however, needs some important
retouching. The first is the increasing attraction of sources of
wisdom attributed to the East. These initiate one into paths to a
happy personal and stellar immortality, founded on terrestrial
asceticism, and are placed under the patronage of long adopted
exotic gods and goddesses such as Isis, or, at least, gods renewed
by exoticism such as the Egyptian Thoth-Hermes. Next, there is the
flowering, on various levels, of symbolic speculations fueled by
the Greek myths, portrayals of episodes invested with new hope
(such as the labors of Hercules on sarcophagi, of the flight of the
Dioscuri on the subterranean vault of the Porta Maggiore in Rome),
as well as the extensive philosophical constructions of a Plotinus
in the third century. In such a perspective, one is confronted less
by the continuity of ancient mythology than by the fabrication of a
contemporary mythology in the second and third centuries, produced
by imperial Hellenism in response to the questions of the time. The
ancient traditions and their symbolic interpretations are combined
with borrowings of varying antiquity from cultures bearing little
or none of the stamp of Hellenism from the Roman or Persian East.
Among these cultures is Judaism in its diverse currents, which at
that time was elaborating its theory of angels and defining the
figure of Satan, itself undergoing influences from Persia. This was
also the time when an obsession with demons, invisible and
omnipresent assailants, was developing, an obsession that
Christianity would claim for its own from the start. Finally, the
myths taught in the Gnostic sect, of which some existed within
Christianity itself, are perhaps the most striking monument to the
powers of invention that were manifesting themselves at the time.
These would have a medieval posterity of their own.

It was in this cultural context that the young Christian Church
had to find its place. An Origen or a Clement of Alexandria were
deeply imbued, on a philosophical level, with the very culture they
found so easy to combat on a literally narrative or naively ritual
level. This leads to an essential, secular ambiguity. The Byzantine
elite, whether or not it was of the Church, would not abandon the
philosophical approach, the rhetorical discipline and the literary
baggage of ancient Hellenism: the teaching it received assured its
cultural preservation, with greater or lesser success from one
period to another, and its distinctive social value remained intact
as a result. On the other hand, Hellenic Christianity as a whole
integrated into its new faith those traditions whose function
remained necessary, such as the annual cycle of festivals. As a
result, the encounter of the Eastern Church with the complex
mythology that existed around the year 313 is not an encounter
between a scholarly culture and a popular culture, but rather the
beginning of a thousand-year coexistence of cultural practices at
different levels of society and different levels of consciousness,
levels whose respective scope and depth would vary according to the
efficacy of the official repression imposed upon the ancient
religion.

We may pass quite quickly over the well-known dates and facts
that serve as landmarks in the battle against the old gods carried
out publicly in the fourth century by the Church, which was
associated with the ruling power except during the short
restoration under Julian (361-363). The repression that had begun
with Constantine reached its official end with the general
prohibition against the ancient religion proclaimed by Theodosius I
in 392. Nevertheless, the reign of Justinian I (527-565) was still
marked by the confiscation of sanctuary properties and the
prohibition of teaching by pagans. Although Bishop Porphyry tore
down the sanctuary of Marneion of Gaza at the end of the fourth
century, the last internal missions, notably those in the mountains
of Asia Minor, were established around 542, and te last matters
involving personalties of the capital, including the patriarch
himself, occurred around 570. The whole of the sixth century is
still marred by skirmishes that erupt in the cities on the days on
which the old festivals, the Vota and Bromalia,
provoke excitement. The seventh century marks the real threshold,
for in Byzantium this was the period of invasions perpetrated by
peoples who were in every way non-Christian Arabs, Avars and Slavs.
The result is a definitive identification between the Christian
cause and that of the political Roman-ness of Hellenic culture. In
626, the Virgin appears on the walls of Constantinople under siege
by the Avars and their troops, and saves it. The victory of
Christian Hellenism is complete thenceforth and for all time.

The realm of Christian Hellenism would be immense if it were
defined as that of churches born, directly or indirectly, of the
Eastern Roman Empire, from Alexandria to Kiev and Moscow, from the
Caucasus to the Balkans. The focus here is on those lands that
remained, virtually, Hellenic in language and, at least
predominantly Hellenic in culture for to venture further,
especially into Slavic lands, would be to pursue the
Christianization of too different a substratum. Delimited in this
way, the history of Christian Hellenism presents three great
continuities on three cultural levels: the elite, the Church and
the Christian people.

Most manifest is the great secular culture of an elite in which
service to the State is closely associated with service to the
Church: both are taught at the same desks, and in a language whose
mythological allusion remains a sign of recognition all the more
appreciable for the fact that it is scholarly. To be sure, the
formalism of an Agathias, in the century of Justinian, is not the
scholarship of a Photius in the ninth century, nor the classical
mastery of Psellus and his friends in the following period.
However, literary references to mythology adorn even sacred
speeches, even episcopal correspondence, and even a Life of a saint
of the eleventh or twelfth centuries that likens the struggle of
the missionary saint Nikon in the region of Sparta to the labors of
Hercules. In the same way, though to a lesser degree, the
iconographic setting of secular life draws on the ancient
repertory. The Neoplatonist current flows without interruption from
Plotinus, through Proclus and the Athenian Academy of the fifth
century, to the philosophers of the capital of the eleventh
century, and then beyond to the person of Georgius Gemistus Plethon
as the empire dragged to its close. There was always a very fine
line, right down to ideas which were suspect and subject to
prosecution, as with John "The Grammarian" and of Leo the
Philosopher in the ninth century, the difficulties experienced by
Michael Psellus, the accusations he himself made against the
patriarch Michael Cerularius, and the trials of John Italos in the
eleventh century. Plumbing the depth of the temptations thus
denounced is difficult. We must not forget that people like Psellus
and, it would seem, Cerularius drew from ancient Hellenism more
than merely the forms and ideas of that great cultural tradition.
They were also nourished with its obscure and dangerous
curiosities, and recovered from it the magical or divinatory
practices that the end of antiquity had developed, especially
against demons for demons continued to offer the same face to
people of the eleventh century, arousing in them the same
obsession.

The greatest source of information on the relations of the Greek
church and its people with Hellenic mythology is to be found in the
documents written by clerical or monastic scribes. Such information
thus has a twofold application, to the practices of the Christian
people but first and foremost to the clerics themselves, We find it
in accounts of martyrs (increasingly flamboyant as time passes), in
the Lives of the saints (which range from quite fictional works of
spiritual edification to biography), in the observations and
interdictions of Church councils, and in the commentaries of later
canonists. Finally, liturgical books, like the collections of magic
formulas that continue an earlier tradition, throw light on the
marginal areas in which the Church accepts and absorbs the
practices of its people, and in which Christianity imprints its own
forms on ancient responses.

The most immutable grounding, and undoubtedly the oldest even
with regard to the ancient religion, is that of the calendar, the
annual cycle of festivals. The council held in 692 in
Constantinople to extirpate the heretical contagion, whether
Judaizing or Hellenic, still fully recognized the ancient rituals
of the traditional festivals that mark the year: the Calends of
January 1st, the Vota of the 6th, the Bromalia of
November-December, and March 1st. The council condemns the wild
dancing that drives women out into the streets, encourages costumes
and masques, and is performed, according to the Fathers, in the
name of the false gods of the Greeks (i.e., the pagans). The
Fathers refrain from naming these gods, with one exception: their
explicit prohibition from proclaiming the name of the
"infamous Dionysus" while trampling grapes in the press.
The hagiography of Steven the Younger, martyred in 764 for his
defense of icons, gives his date of death as November 28th the day
on which the iconoclastic emperor, by his own testimony hardened in
his Hellenism (i.e., paganism), celebrates the Bromalia,
proclaiming the names of Dionysus and Bromius, the fathers of seed
grains and wine. Commenting on these canons in the twelfth century,
Theodorus Balsamon asserts that the practices they condemn have not
yet disappeared. Demetrius Chomatianus, archbishop of Achrida at
the beginning of the thirteenth century, mentions the same
festivities while also giving details about the Rousalia
carnival, which Balsamon indicated as a practice found on the
borders of the Empire. This immemorial cycle, in which the dead and
living take part in the succession of the agrarian seasons,
persists throughout the empire. Its culminating periods are the
Twelve Days that separate Christmas from the Epiphany, the three
weeks of Carnival (during which the pantomimes of the
Kalogheroi reproduce an archaic Dionysian ritual of death
and resurrection), Saint george's Day in April (a festival of
shepherds, like the ancient Parilia), Pentecost in its
connection with the dead, and the night of Saint John in June. The
sites bear witness to the same permanence, especially the
sanctuaries dedicated to Christian saints to whom people still come
in search of healing, most often through the ancient ritual of
spending the night there (incubation): the practice is attested to
without a break through the medieval period.

This victorious perenniality was bought at the price of the
almost total obliteration of the names of the gods themselves. At
the beginning of the Greek Middle Ages, a lesser power, often
malevolent, doomed to defeat in the end but uncontested in the
present, as the lingering sign of the old gods in the Hellenic
Christian consciousness (starting with that of the clergy itself).
Yet the names of those gods were quickly repudiated, which is
equally significant; the council of 692 passed over their names in
silence in reference to their festivals, but also in the important
and oft-renewed prohibition against forms of oath-taking and
especially of divination. In the stories of martyrs composed after
the triumph of the Church, the gods are named wrongly or driven
into anonymity. These tales recount the victory of their hero over
the Hellenic gods his persecutor has ordered him to worship, gods
whose statues crumble to dust at the invocation of a Christian. The
designation of the gods shows to what extent their memory has
become blurred in the mind of the ordinary cleric. Sometimes a
single god, such as Apollo, is designated as superior to all
others. Sometimes they are degraded collectively as anonymous
"demons." In the same vein, the Lives of the saints up to
the sixth century relate militant episodes of destruction of local
sanctuaries. Yet in the same period, and even later, they also
envoke victories over demons of the in trees or lurk in isolated
tombs or ancient ruins. The action taken by the Church thus
represented the other side of a general belief that it shared, and
with which it was imbued, at both a popular and a local level, even
in its own ritual.

Christian Hellenism, then, did not forget the ancient religious
strand but eclipsed the names of the gods under whose patronage he
old rituals were performed and, by that act, dissolved the mythic
accounts that explained those rituals.